


cause all of the stars

by aceofdiamonds



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Grief/Mourning, Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-30
Updated: 2016-03-30
Packaged: 2018-05-30 05:20:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6410431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aceofdiamonds/pseuds/aceofdiamonds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry steps forward and places himself at the centre of the memorial effort -- the need for legacy growing ever stronger as more weeks pass and the physical  remains of the war begin to disappear.</p><p>He stresses the importance of remembrance and memory and inclusion till he’s hoarse and his hands are shaking.</p>
            </blockquote>





	cause all of the stars

**Author's Note:**

> because you can’t have too many harry after the war thoughts -- this is my sixth one or something like that. memorialisation came up a lot in one of my uni courses this year and the different forms it can take and that descended into this. title is from stop crying your heart out by oasis (or leona lewis, which is more accurate for my listening)

 

  


Harry’s lost enough people in his life to know that there are many different ways of grieving. He’s looked at pictures and he’s listened to memories and he’s gotten angry and sad and lonely and he’s dragged everything down around him as he’s tried to make sense of the destruction of everyone he loves and he’s tried and tried and tried.

To grieve is to be exhausted. It’s to be weighted down with the loss of someone you love, with the knowledge and the denial that there is no way to speak to them again, stones lost in the forest aside. It’s the fatigue of going through the day, of getting up, going to work, eating, sleeping, and repeating it all again. Harry blinks his eyes against the brightness of the sun and feels untoward bursts of anger towards the light reflecting against the windows, bouncing off photos, blurring their faces from his view. That’s another thing about grief — it rips apart any semblance of balance he had over your emotions. He finds himself blinking back tears as he walks down the street and he catches the eye of someone the same colour eyes as Remus or Sirius or Tonks and not two minutes later he’s laughing at something Fred said, something Colin did, and then again, too quick to control, he’s curling his hands into fists at the Death Eaters, at Voldemort, at the bend of fate that pulled them from him.

He’s been through this before, after the maze, the Cup, Cedric, but this time around it feels magnified in a way that makes him wake with a gasp every other night, his sheets clinging to him to the point where he drags himself out of bed and spends the rest of the night on the couch.

Sometimes -- and he knows this is stupid but he does it anyway -- sometimes he takes off his glasses so the world blurs out of focus and he looks at the generic stock photos that came with the photo frames he bought on a whim and he pretends these blurry faceless people are the family he doesn’t have, the Potters, the Evans, that have been long gone. He sits there in his flat with his glasses dangling from his hand, a pain already building behind his eyes from his squinting, and he looks at his fake family because sometimes that feels like all he’s got.

It’s stupid, he knows, but grief plays with your head, it makes you think in illogical ways, makes you leap onto anything that might make your heart stop aching and your lungs stop struggling.

Grief on this level, for a school, a country, too many friends and family too count, is difficult. There’s no other word for it. It’s fucking hard.  


 

.

 

 

He doesn’t spend his days running after dark wizards anymore but he can help preserve the memories of those who died doing what they were all trying to do: protecting. The country doesn’t need their Chosen One, their Savior, to be the face of the clean-up, of their new Ministry. They need him to work to keep those who don’t have a voice from being forgotten in future history talks, in future speeches that focus on the boy in the middle of it all and miss out the hundreds who helped him achieve so much more.

Harry steps forward and places himself at the centre of the memorial effort -- the need for legacy growing ever stronger as more weeks pass and the physical  remains of the war begin to disappear.

He stresses the importance of remembrance and memory and inclusion till he’s hoarse and his hands are shaking.

When someone asks him why it’s so important to him, why he’s breaking his back for this tournament, for the statue, for the establishment of the veteran’s fund, he can only think of Peter Pettigrew who was wrongly martyred, of Sirius and Remus whose efforts the first time around were passed over for their misnamed crimes, of the Longbottoms, of the Prewetts, of his family, of all those whose names aren’t ever going to carry as much weight as his own, and all those who should.

He shakes his head, shrugs, suddenly inarticulate after all of his talking, and they understand. For the moment the how is more important than the why. The why will come later.

 

 

.

 

 

Harry doesn’t turn away from the Ministry and its space within the Aurors but he doesn’t accept them either. That’s not what he wants to do. He’s had enough of hunting dark wizards and putting everyone in danger. So he chooses Quidditch which is safer and calmer and it’s something he enjoys. He hasn’t done something he enjoys since he was sixteen.

He flies high in the sky and all he worries about is the next game, the next catch, the next league, and he doesn’t listen to those who say he’s shirking his responsibilities in the building of a new society.

What he does to quell the rumours of The Chosen One leaving everyone to scrabble in the dust is he puts together a Quidditch tournament in the newly rebuilt Quidditch grounds at Hogwarts. He pulls together resources and money and talks to people from all groups involved in the war and he sets up this tournament, to honour those they have lost.

The proceeds -- and there are a lot of them; people like this idea of combining sport with memorialisation -- go towards a statue that will stand in the Entrance Hall of the castle, the names of all those lost and all those wounded inscribed upon it. They raise a lot and then Harry adds some more because he still feels responsible for it all, no matter how many times people tell him isn’t, and this is the most concrete way he can think of to do something about it.

It becomes an annual event with players from all over the country coming to take part. They combine those from different houses, different teams; put seasoned players with people who have been on a broom once before in their lives. They mix everyone in ways that they always should have been -- they destroy stigmas and prejudices during these matches as they reminisce about old days and build memories for new ones.

It might sound overly simplistic, that Quidditch can do all of this. If a government can’t mend these broken barriers and long-held grudges then how can sport? But it brings people together, it puts them in a situation where they can have fun without thinking about it too much, without feeling guilty, all while working towards a good cause, and that’s what Harry offers them, and that’s what they take with open hands.

 

 

.

 

 

He packs up Grimmauld Place and offers it to anyone who wants it. With Kreacher at Hogwarts and everyone else in the Black family dead or disgraced, it’s Andromeda’s for the taking but she shakes her head with a bitter smile and echoes Harry’s offer -- anyone who wants this dark, bleak, memory-ridden house can have it.

Harry moves into a bright, open, clean flat not far from Diagon Alley. It has a kitchen, a living room, a bathroom, a bedroom for Harry, and one for Teddy when he comes to stay. It’s not been here for long; there are no visible signs of life before Harry moves in, which is what he wants after living in borrowed, stale, space for so long. It's the place he needs if he wants to be able to sleep at night and if he wants to move on from the past.

 

 

.

 

 

Harry and Ginny fall back together a year after the war. A year after silent conversations in the garden of the Burrow, after walks and confessions and tears that won’t stop. Ginny’s the strongest person Harry has ever met; he tells her this as she cries into his shoulder and feels guilty for everyone she couldn’t save. To be on the other side of that feeling, to be the one reassuring Ginny that she did brilliantly, that it takes more than just one person to save a generation, is helpful to Harry, too, as he takes his own advice and the lead ball of guilt that has curled up within his stomach for years now dissolves slightly, the beginning of the next period in their lives imminent.

They fall back together slowly. Ginny is preoccupied with school, with George, with her mum and dad, and the mending of her own soul. Harry is quiet, tired, obsessive over the past. They don’t have the time for a relationship past the comfort they can offer each other that they struggle to find with anyone else. But, before Harry turns nineteen and the country has passed the obstacle of the war’s first anniversary, he finds himself at the Burrow, helping set the table for lunch, and then he’s excusing himself and climbing the stairs, knocking on Ginny’s door, letting himself in at her quiet admission.

He kisses her in the same place she kissed him almost two years ago. He kisses her and she kisses him and it feels the same as it did all those months ago but a thousand times better without the threat of Voldemort hanging above them. His hands tangle in her hair and he pulls her close against him, breaking away into a smile when her fingers dig into his waist, nails skating over the place she found when they were younger and could stretch out by the lake and kiss for hours and hours with no one caring where they had gone.

“What brought that on?” Ginny asks, hand reaching up to cup his face.

“I’ve missed you,” he says, and she doesn’t say that she’s been here all along because while that’s true neither had been ready for this before now, but now they are.

“This is good,” she says decisively. She kisses him, her lips soft. “I’ve missed you, too, Harry.”

Much like the way it was for them before, they fall back together slowly, easily. They’ve been there for each other for the last year in so many ways that the only thing that changes now that they’ve shifted their relationship again is that sometimes Harry fits himself into Ginny’s tiny single bed and sometimes Ginny stays over in the slightly bigger bed in Harry’s flat, and they sleep all the easier for it.  


 

.

 

 

It can be a horribly lonely thing -- the process of grief. It can feel like no one in the world has ever felt this way and no one in the world could ever understand.

Before, when it was his parents, when it was Cedric, even when it was Sirius and Dumbledore, Harry always felt like he was the only one who cared. He never knew how to reach out to people; he exploded with the mess of emotions inside him instead.

To be with Ginny, and to be around those who know so much about the bleakness and complete emptiness of grief, means that he is selfish in his gratitude that he no longer feels so alone.  


 

.

 

 

He takes this back two days later when he comes home from practice to find Ginny lying in his bed, shoulders shaking with her sobs. He wishes the world didn’t have to feel the pit of loss and the ache of those who are gone. He lies down beside her, a hand gentle on her shoulder, and when she stops crying a while later she twists so she can bury her face in his chest, her hands tight as they pull his Quidditch shirt taut.

Empathy is the most important thing Harry can offer. He holds it out and Ginny takes it with both hands, her gratitude clear in the loosening of her grip, the slackening of her shoulders.

When grief is spread it doesn’t dilute in any way but the understanding and the tolerance that comes with it is enough for people to feel like there might be a way out of this, that they don’t have to feel like they’re constantly drowning.

 

 

.  


 

  
When they have kids Harry and Ginny don't take names from their dead friends and their dead family. They don't recycle or reuse or reshape. They choose new names, Aiden and Isla and Jack, and they hold them close and tell them about the people they lost when they're old enough to ask and not weighted down with other people's names.  
  
They give them middle names, though, and that's where they do their remembering because despite what he's said about weights and expectations, Harry likes the attachment of his dad's name to his own. So Aiden becomes Aiden Sirius and Isla becomes Isla Luna and Jack becomes Jack Remus. The Isla Luna is more to do with the roll of the _l_ s off the tongue rather than any remembering because Luna is here to pull them into a hug and kiss their cheeks and thank them for the honour.  


 

.  


 

With their lives revolving around Quidditch, both their careers based within it along with the kids’ love of the sport, it can become easy to encircle themselves in this world, where fouls and hard falls are the worst that can happen. It is important not to let this override everything else they've done. It is important not to pretend that Ginny hasn't lost a brother, that a number of their friends and classmates aren’t dead or wounded beyond help, that they, and almost everyone they know, don’t still have the occasional nightmare that jerks them back to their months of war. It is important to live their lives and while it is crucial that they raise their children in this state of peace that their parents fought for them to have, it is important to answer the questions that they will inevitably ask and it is important not to lie, not to sweet-talk the horrors they lived and the hell they managed to stumble through after it was all over. To pretend and to forget is to erase and that is not the method of memorialization that will pave the way for future generations and the reminders of how to solve their conflicts and reshape their attitudes.  


 

.

 

 

Harry’s been here from the start. He’s been in a state of mourning in one way or another since day one. He’s lived his life shaped by loss and substituting those he doesn’t have with ones he chooses, ones he’s given. He’s grown up with the hole of grief buried deep within him but he’s learned to cope, learned to live. He knows how to live happily, how to have fun and how to love, without guilt and sadness bearing down on him every second of the day. He knows how to live without dismissing the past into some forgotten corner, and that's the balance they need. He plays Quidditch; he loves his wife and his friends; he comes home to his kids. This is a success story.

 

 


End file.
